Scale in video games

This is an example I found (albeit not a great one) - everything seems more...condensed in the game. The feel is great but the scope of everything seems greater in real life.

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I'm 38 and have been playing games for over 30 years.

GTAV is my favorite game of all time so I'm certainly not "shitting on it", and I'm not talking about freedom. I'm talking about that feeling like when you stand in front of a house IRL vs in a game.

I'm not talking about map size where driving from one end to another would take a day - they did something like that with Fuel (I think it was an hour or something) and it was fucking boring.

It takes maybe 15-20 minutes to drive through the average city, I'm guessing. Games like GTA are saying "hey, let's make the map bigger - let's make it a whole GROUP of cities", but what I wish they'd do is make the cities smaller, with a stronger focus on density and scale. One city, 15 minutes one side to the other, instead of traversing multiple cities in five minutes. Doesn't have to be populated with millions of people or have every building accessible. I think the current technology can handle everything minus that, but once the scale and density are down then the technology of the future can fill in the population and other details.

I guess that's where I was going.

gta 5 is based on LA. right now, according to google maps it could take up to 1 hour 30 minutes to drive from long beach to burbank
 
gta 5 is based on LA. right now, according to google maps it could take up to 1 hour 30 minutes to drive from long beach to burbank

One of the reasons you can travel so fast in the game imo is the lack of real "LA Traffic". One of the more immersive aspects of GTA 4 was the traffic. It was impressively realistic for a 2008 game, especially on the bridges where the traffic would back up for the whole thing. But they kind of dropped the ball on traffic for GTA 5. LA is the worst city in the world for traffic and yet there are as many cars as there were for GTA 3. A nicer option (at least on PC) would be a slider just for cars you could adjust based on your specs.

The other thing that would be kick ass in open world games is having NPCs have actual conversations. Hitman for example, has a really impressive amount of varied NPCs in any given area. The real immersion killer though is that none of them actual speak to each other. There is a generic background noise sound but when you walk up to crowds of people you can't actually hear any of them talking.
 
Actually the newer Assassin's Creed games are getting close to feeling like the scale of a true city

The cities in Unity and Syndicate are huge
 
That was a big map, sure - but the buildings felt awfully tiny.

Possibly, also the small 4x4 drives like a damn remote control hot wheels car. The front and rear wheels are almost touching. Travel wise i have spent more time than actually carrying out missions.
 
One of the reasons you can travel so fast in the game imo is the lack of real "LA Traffic". One of the more immersive aspects of GTA 4 was the traffic. It was impressively realistic for a 2008 game, especially on the bridges where the traffic would back up for the whole thing. But they kind of dropped the ball on traffic for GTA 5. LA is the worst city in the world for traffic and yet there are as many cars as there were for GTA 3. A nicer option (at least on PC) would be a slider just for cars you could adjust based on your specs.

Yeah, if you could go around 100 miles an hour you could get from Long Beach to Burbank in about 20 minutes. Personally I think recreating LA traffic for a car-heist game would absolutely suck and end up with a lot of car ditching and shoot-outs. A slider idea is cool though. Or make it a part of the difficulty setting or something.
 
This is an example I found (albeit not a great one) - everything seems more...condensed in the game. The feel is great but the scope of everything seems greater in real life.

lIhJX55.jpg

It's not 1 to 1 scale, nowhere near, so remaking gta V location shots irl will be of vastly different scale.

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